All of them, actually, as there was representation from Malaysia, Spain, Switzerland and the USA its always great to learn about some of the cultural nuances and technology shifts happening in different regions! Certainly some of the aspects that Yvan of Switzerlands HostPoint spoke of in having to provide support in four languages was quite surprising! Certainly not something anyone else on the panel could relate and have thought of specifically!

What were some of the key points raised?

Privacy was probably first and foremost in the discussions surrounding global delivery of services. Data sovereignty has become a specific enterprise focus, ensuring data is retained within the region and jurisdiction of the customer. As we were discussing areas of a global nature – place, power, and ping (so where in the world are people going, what is the market like for power availability and cost, and what are the networking and interconnect opportunities to make a successful cloud provider thrive) – and the key drivers in different regions. We also talked about world’s cultural differences, sensitivities in the different markets and ‘localisation of your business to suit that market, with all the challenges that it involves.

Where there any particular new products, or customer projects, that stood out?

A fair amount of discussions happened surrounding specialist application knowledge, and how organisations are becoming more niched into certain areas as the general baseline infrastructure aspect is becoming more commoditised. This is where Datanet and our Private cloud offerings have seen great success with ISV’s and traditional on premise application management companies deciding to use our infrastructure and expertise so they can remain focussed on their core applications.

The orchestration of different clouds is also a hot topic, with new software allowing people to migrate workloads between on premise and a variety of both public and private cloud providers.

Technology wise, it wasn’t a time for revolutionary areas of change. I think we’re currently in the stage of the evolution of existing technologies and software and how they interact with each other in an autonomous manner. The standards and interoperability is key to allowing open and flexible future developments, and should pave the way for some revolutionary aspects in the future I hope. As ever, technology continues to move a pace and ensuring we are translating that into real business for our customers is where we bring significant value.